A CRIME REVISITED: WILDING

A CRIME REVISITED: WILDING; A Word That Seared a City's Imagination

By ROBERT F. WORTH

Published: December 6, 2002

The word caught on after it was used by the initial suspects in the Central Park jogger attack. ''We were going wilding,'' one of them told the police investigators, who had never heard the term before.

Within days, it was adopted to describe bursts of violence by roving groups of young people. To many, it seemed to express aptly both the barbarity of the Central Park attack itself and the nation's broader worries about a surge in violent youth crime. ''Wilding -- as American as Tom Sawyer'' was the title of an opinion piece published in The New York Times in May 1989. In 1993, the word was included in a supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary: ''The action or practice by a gang of youths of going on a protracted and violent rampage in a street, park or other public place, attacking or mugging people at random along the way; also, an instance of this.'' The American Heritage Dictionary followed suit in its fourth edition, released in 2000.

Curiously, ''wilding'' was first used in the same sense at least a year or two before the 1989 attack, said Jesse Sheidlower, an editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The word appears to have faded somewhat from popular use in recent years, perhaps because it was intrinsically linked with the Central Park jogger case.

''My impression is that it is associated with that crime and that era,'' said Allan Metcalf, a professor at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill., who recently published a book on how new words are adopted. ''When those issues faded from public consciousness, the word faded.''

For that reason, the term may eventually drop out of use entirely, said Steven R. Kleinedler, a senior editor at the American Heritage Dictionary. He compared it to ''stalkerazzi,'' a word that was widely used in the aftermath of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, to describe particularly aggressive journalists who cover celebrities.